Peter Vatistas

It’s official, I have made the decision to migrate all my desktops and laptops to Apple after 15 years with Windows. The really funny thing about my situation is there are tons of people doing the same and I found that by going to Craigslist. Try this, go to your local Craigslist page and search computers for sale, you’ll notice a lot of people willing to trade for Mac’s and Macbooks.I have an extremely powerful and fast desktop computer by Dell, and a couple laptops by Compaq. I am replacing all of them with the following:1. Mac Pro (Desktop) - Dual Quad Core Intel Processors, 4GB Ram, 2TB Sata’s, 4 nVidia Graphics Cards, and 2 30″ LCD’s.2. Macbook Pro (Laptop) - 15″ 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 200GB.3. Macbook (Laptop) - 13″ - Black, 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, 250GB.I’ve already made the switch at my office and have been using my Mac Pro for months on a Windows 2003 Domain. I recently upgraded to Leopard OS X and am in heaven, goodbye Windows!!In addition to the computers I have already replaced my phone and my wife’s phone with Apple’s iPhone. We’re adding the Apple TV to the family room as well. We’re hooked!!Have you made the switch? Are you thinking about making the leap into the world of Apple computers and electronics? I am really interested to here your story.

Here is a great tool I use a lot to find passwords on my computer and passwords across the network on all computers. SpotAuditor can scan your network’s IP Range using any credentials you give it (Admin rights preferably) and it will spit out passwords typed in or stored from every computer it see’s. Spot Auditor can also reveal visited URL’s, installed programs, and passwords under asteriks (i.e. ******).

Download it for free with the link I provide below and see how helpful SpotAuditor really is! If you’re a network Administrator I would make sure these aren’t sitting on employee computers, big problem!

SpotAuditor Password Recovery Software - Compatible with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista

90% of my day is spent remoting into my server farm to make changes, monitor, and etc… Normally when I need the task manager I do the normal Start>Run>taskmgr command to get me there but I never realized I could have a CTRL+ALT+DELETE like command. Normally when you remote desktop and hit ctrl+alt+delete it invokes YOUR computers options, not the computer you are remoting into. The solution for this (and I am sure I am years behind on this) is CTRL+ALT+END!

It is funny how knowledgable I think I am when it comes to Microsoft products but when I learn something like this I feel dumb! What cool tricks have you found out by accident or totally made you feel like a newb? I would love to hear them.

I am sure by now most of you have had a chance to see Microsoft’s new OS called Windows Vista. You’ve also probably heard of the many issues people have with Vista on their computers and I have to tell you there are a good amount. I have several new computers and have upgraded all to Vista Ultimate over the last few days, actually one of the computers I upgraded the day Vista Ultimate came out (bad idea).Each computer after the Vista upgrade has had their own unique issues ranging from incompatible drivers to incompatible hardware. Being that all the computers I own are brand new, Vista Premium Ready, and well beyond the best recommendations for installation I was pretty bummed by the issues I was facing.

The breakdown:

Desktop computer: Dual-Quad Core Xeon 3.0GHz Processors, 6GB 667MHz ECC RAM, 4-146GB SAS 15k drives, and Dual 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra video cards with AGEIA PhysX physics accelerator. This computer is a bad mamma jamma and has given me a lot of problems when upgrading to Vista.

First (and also the most expensive problem) was the memory. At the time of the upgrade I had 1 GB of ram (which Microsoft recommends) and though it was barely decent when I ran Vista without all the cool aesthetics, there was a much bigger problem; it was incompatible (blue screen every few hours during different tasks using different applications)! I had to go to Dell and order a newer set of memory and because I noticed how crap the performance was while running Vista in Aero mode (the more graphically intensive desktop) I ordered 6GB’s of the new memory (overkill, I know). Problem fixed, no more blue screens, no more slowness at all.

On to the next problem: The FireWire card; just not compatible whatsoever, end of story, bought a brand new one and works fine.

And the next: Applications! Odd right? Okay I totally expected a few applications to have issues and there were: CuteFTP, MS Office 2003 Pro (WIERD!?!?), and a few other titles which I just had to wait it out until they released updates (Adobe, Macromedia, etc…).

Oh and one more: My $400 sound card, seriously come on already!! This was a card that I actually bought 6 months before I bought the computer & Vista but it was recommended to me and labeled as “compatible with Windows Vista”. It’s actually quite funny because while I was fighting to get everything to work properly I never actually remembered hearing anything, no OS sounds, no music, nothing… LOL! Oh well, I’m already down $1800, what’s another $450 right? Replaced and problem solved.

Okay now I am sure your thinking that taking the leap to Windows Vista is a bad idea but I do have to say my incompatible drivers and peripherals were a unique problem and everyone will have a different “compatibility” problem. With that being said, please stay tuned and check out my next post on how bad ass I think Microsoft’s Windows Vista really is, after the war on compatibility.